No Business:: Clawing Through the Back Doors of Show Biz

By Arturo Armand Hammer

Theres no business like show business, and Arturo Hammer knows that firsthand. From the hard-drinking fields of Northern California, to the soft entertainment fields of Hollywood, and from the orchards of the Big Apple to the jungles of Indochina, Hammer goes on a drug-fueled, sex-driven, high-intensity journey through the 1960s and beyond.

No Business follows the wildly unpredictable exploits of Hammer as he pulls back the curtain on the entertainment world to reveal the players and machinations which have come to define the United States and the world at large. With his less-than-humble beginnings in Northern California agriculture, Hammer shares the anecdotes and colorful stories from his life, including a romp through Hollywoods cult of celebrity, New Yorks commercial art explosion, and the international music scene before finding himself cast into the dark nether regions of international narco-politics and the expanding brutalities defining post-war America.

Engaging and outraging some of the biggest names in show business, Hammer gives show business a serious run for its money.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480861800

Arturo Armand Hammer

Arturo Hammer has worked for over thirty years in the entertainment industry. A resident of Los Angeles, he is the author of over twenty screenplays, who directed his self-penned independent feature Dead Air in 1998. In 2015 he authored the historical fiction novel No Business: Clawing Through the Back Doors of Show Biz and the nonfiction book Zero to One Thousand Indiscreet With the Tweet Elite. He has written hundreds of songs, essays, blogs, and promotional spots. His work includes avant-garde musical composition, graphic art, and prop fabrication.

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Copyright © 2018 Arturo Armand Hammer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6178-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6179-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6180-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946715

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/18/2018

For Robin

&

Nicole

Dedicated to Jan and Bill, who would have appreciated

the fact of this more than the content. Much more.

INTRODUCTIONARIUM

THIS HAS BEEN GERMINATING FOR A LONG TIME, ITS ABsurdist seedlings planted deep into my cranium over the course of many years. My landscapers were wide, varied, and more than a little disturbed: The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Danny Kaye, Woody Allen, Monty Python, Firesign Theater, Frank Zappa, George Carlin, and so many more. These people spoke to me, usually in funny voices saying the exact opposite of what was expected or accepted as proper. They were the loud, long fart during the sermon, the cries of Mendacity! in a squeaky voice during the stump speech, and the uncontrollable laughter during the board meeting. My garden grows of impropriety and I fertilize it well.

What can I say? Convention is boring. So my work is necessarily unconventional out of enlightened self-interest. If I don’t enjoy it, how can I hope that anyone else will?

Several years back I came into contact with others who called themselves writers. As one to take another at their words, I offered them a writing exercise/challenge, thinking that as writers, we would be well served by, you know, writing and stuff. The initial challenge/exercise was born of a freeform paragraph I dashed off. The challenge was to write a story based upon it, nothing too obnoxious, maybe a page. It was a good set-up and the story I came up with became the personal seed of this madness. Curiously, none of the writers I offered the challenge to rose to it, so it appeared that it would die there.

But for Robin. Robin is, among many other wonderful things, my muse. And as an amazingly effective muse, she reads my work. All of it. She listens to my music. All of it. And my art? Yep. Robin, in her musey capacity, motivates my work because she considers my work and respects it. If she doesn’t like something I do, she tells me. As my muse, she is my audience.

And the feedback? Stupendous!

Every artist needs a muse. Every artist needs an audience. We can all improve in our work with honest feedback. Unsurprisingly, competition colors that as we jockey for position. The ideal of the muse is that of someone not in competition with the artist, but someone in awe of him or her. This appreciation drives the artist to grander expression and the creative dialogue is enhanced for all.

Robin, who doesn’t call herself a writer, took the writing challenge. And the paragraph became about a hundred pages for each of us. The challenge is simple and egalitarian. It can be a title, a sentence, a paragraph, character, situation, genre, etc., and the participants trade off challenge to challenge. I did the first one, Robin did the second one, and away we went.

During this period, I created what I call Faux Tography, which is the Photoshopping of people I know into obscure photos, then writing a first-person account of the particulars of the picture. As we exist in a culture of celebrity worship, I found that placing my subjects with people they admired appealed to them.

At least until they read the story.

What can I say? Absurdism isn’t for everyone.

was spawned of these writing challenges and Faux Tographies, and much like them exists as spontaneous stream-of-consciousness story-telling. Often from sentence to sentence, I had no idea what was coming next. For a bit. My celebrity guests made things more structured as the shocking realities of their considerable lives provided a grounding source in the escalating madness one would expect in pitting show biz against Art.

Most of the sordid stories are true: Robert Wagner did, by his own account, stalk Warren Beatty with a loaded gun; Ted Nugent, by his own accounts, was so terrified of serving his country in Vietnam he literally shit his pants; Led Zeppelin are plagiarists; Jimi Hendrix appears to have been murdered. While I don’t wish to suggest direct knowledge that Annette Funicello talked to herself, the situation as described actually occurred in another time, place, and with another subject. This is historical fiction, and I have worked to offer as realistic and factual fiction as I can based upon research, personal knowledge, and abundant evidence.

Because this comes into being spontaneously, I offer humor as it occurs to me as I write. I don’t mine jokes or build set-ups based upon them. I don’t have to as I never want for material. That stated, I have an inexplicably good memory and have seen thousands of comedic displays over the course of my life, meaning that some of that stuff is still crawling around in here. I would never knowingly use someone else’s joke or line, and especially in a book so steeped in condemning plagiary. But the zeitgeist is powerful and I am not beyond its influence, so if my brilliant notion exists in some other more brilliant form previously, I apologize for denying you attribution and trust I served the humor well.

Beyond that, enjoy the ride.

Peace.

Arturo Hammer

Los Angeles

8/7/15

TABLE OF CONTENTMENTS

I – Know Business

II – High School Lows

III – Miceum

III.V – (My Favorite Hour)

IV – Vermin Worship

V – I Knew Natalie Would

VI – Adrifter

VII – Exploiting the Caustic Inexecrable

VIII – Art A Hammer

IX – A Wall Unsound

X – Compound Fractures

XI – Captain Trip and the Light – Fantastic

XII – Just Say Absolutely

XIII – It Takes a Village, Idiot

XIV – Trow Da Bums Out

XV – They Shoot Movies, Don’t They?

XVI – Owe the Humanity

XVII – Jacked Up

XVIII – The End of an Error

XIX – A Leopard Among Panthers

XX – Far Too Experienced

XXI – Motherfuckers

XXII – Outsourced

XXIII – Holy Land

XXIV – Fantôme Blond

XXV – J Hoover: Grimefighter

XXVI – In Seussscience

XXVII – Chapter Creeps (A Stand-Up Guy)

XXVIII – Two Birds With One Stoner

XXIX – Oh No!

XXX – A Trip To The Farm (E I E I Ohhh)

Know Business

Trow Da Bums Out!

Artopsy

I – KNOW BUSINESS

While all of this happened, none of this happened.

I’D BEEN STAYING WITH MY MOM AT A LITTLE HOLE IN San Pedro, California. It was a cozy place and because it was Mom’s, very affordable, although admittedly at the time that didn’t seem of prime importance. My room wasn’t much to speak of and even less to write about, a shame really with all this white space here desperate for descriptive content and these anxious little pixels just aching to provide it. But a good author knows when to exercise restraint (usually the only exercise taken by writers, a generally spindly lot) and the pixels will have their days by and by. My sustenance needs were met with three squares a day, two circles and a rhombus, for which I had little use.

Suffice it to say I was quite comfortable, my life was simple and as such uncomplicated – all was right with the world and I was content in my place in it. During our time cohabitating, she had married my dad and he had moved in, imposing himself in my comfort zone. Sure, he provided for it, but just as kids come between their parents, parents come into their own or each other to make kids, and regardless, nobody likes losing prime position at the nurturing tit just because Pop’s got a woody. I was very young, and thus unable to appreciate the nuance of sweaty pounding sex, and my parents going at it in near constancy was jarring to my young mind to say the least, while it was jarring and a bunch of other stuff to say more than the least, but not much. There can be little doubt that the sex we are raised with comes to determine the sex we enjoy in the present, or lack thereof.

Things had been going along swimmingly for months and I could perceive no need to change our living situation; they had their space, I had mine. But in a little less than a year, my presence had become an impediment to my father’s insatiable horndoggery and there was discussion of my relocation. It was never directly to me, but all sneaky-like when they were sure I couldn’t hear them. I heard plenty, I assure you, though I will admit I had trouble understanding their reasoning. I was quiet, my room was small and I used a minimum of resources, so I couldn’t see a problem. As my room had no windows, it was hard for me to see much at all, but I could see the writing on the wall and it didn’t look good – my penmanship is appalling.

The big push came in March and it was clear I would be moving sooner than I had gathered in their surreptitious discourse. I remember it like it was a month or so before yesterday: my mom started wailing, which got my dad all worked up, and with some frenzied words exchanged we bundled up and trundled into the car. It appeared they intended to dump me somewhere far away from home. I had worn out my welcome, the first of many times to come. On the road, I guess I panicked and tried to get out, but Mom kept me locked up tight, restrained and secure until our destination. This created an early division between us, my lashing out and her pushing back, my dad driving this gas-guzzling Wedge between us and running all the lights.

When we finally arrived, there was a flurry of mad activity and I sensed an increasing attention directed toward me – the pressure was really on. There was a notable urgency among those who had gathered; it appeared my castoff would be well attended. Even though I could not effectively interpret what they conveyed, I had an undeniable feeling there was powerful concern, something I had done or had yet to do. But for some reason, I couldn’t put it into words and nobody was asking.

Suddenly the place was like a high-speed high-beam on a dark two-lane road in heavy fog, and I found myself mashed into a tiny canal, being forced into the blinding light, pushed out, everything blurry and beyond rational focus – I couldn’t see shit, though I felt an inexplicable kinship with it. Then I flopped around like a rubber chicken, suspended by my feet, my cute little feet, in a strange room filled with stranger strangers. The strangest being the man in white who held me, a medical professional of some sort. I realized this gigantic fellow was displaying me to others in the brightly illuminated room and that I was naked. I popped out into a room full of freaks gawking at my naked form, one noting my masculine appendage and pronouncing that I was to be raised as a male of the species. It’s a boy.

It? That’s what I am described as, an it? A male it. Just fucking ducky. And then to compound indignities, the bastard doctor smacked me on the ass – the first of many to come, many of them unwelcome – and I thought, I’m getting spanked for being born and I wasn’t even consulted about the whole thing. As I was placed into my mother’s trembling arms I ruminated, I’m never doing that again.

I was conceptualized after the war (pick one) and found myself imbued with a can-do spirit, a blow-the-holy-shit-out-of-any-opposition mindset, and a if-you’re-going-that-way-anyway-can-I-catch-a-lift driving force; a fledgling unready for a world ill-prepared for me. I was rightly drawn to the arts young but, not wanting to paint myself into a corner, developed an almost lyrical capacity to be marginal in numerous creative musings concurrently. Variety being the spicy life, or some such thing.

My delivery occurred in Long Beach, a port town south of Los Angeles improper, and quite watery, which allowed for boating and shipping (with actual ships), and which accounts for my abiding love of the C, a wonderful consonant. In fact, for many of my deformative years the C was my consonant companion, creating a complex comforting correlation clear of causality or certainty yet cloistered in clinical cognition conditioned by clarity of concentration. Sure, my close ones told me such behavior would lead me to L, but as a man of letters, I would necessarily end up there in time, or if not, hopefully not too late for afters.¹

My mother, Maria Consuela Elena knee Henderson, was a gentle woman, a rough man, and a playful child, often all at the same time. This led to considerable tension and cooing – Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? – certainly better than tension but still terribly annoying after about fifteen seconds. We had a tumultuous relationship, although in retrospect I couldn’t have done this without her – or anything, to be fair. She really needed to birth me for me to be of much use to anyone. And owing to her rampant sexuality – she had a vagina – and my father’s deep abiding affection – he liked to fuck stuff – I was brought forth in order to bring this fifth.

My father, Wilhelm Rodrigo von Hammer, was a first-generation American. His father was born in the Old Country, moved to a more recent city, then to a relatively established nation, across an extremely damp ocean, all when he was very young and had little to say about it. This initially due to a lack of vocabulary, then later to many wicked smacks across the knuckles for sass and vulgarity. Fortunately for Francisco Claus van Hammer – Grandpa Frank to the kids – as he came from royalty, the knuckles his elders rapped were usually some poor person’s or service personnel’s. One didn’t want to wait table when young Frank got saucy, as gratuities often came with smacks on the tips.

Wilhelm – Bill to his friend and people he owed money to – was Frank’s second child (the one he didn’t want), and grew up very boisterous and insecure, compensating delightfully with drunken debauching, mad bursts of extreme violence, and 40s pop standards. You Always Hurt the One You Love had a particular resonance around the homestead and as kids we often wondered what one did with those they merely liked. At the time it seemed that it had to be a favorable alternative. In retrospect, perhaps not as much so.

The vin Hammers were reputedly descended of the Cunard line of Bavaria, though direct lineage was difficult to trace as the family tree had been uprooted and replaced with a hedge by Julio, the new landscaper, owing to a botanical miscommunication. Kraus Diesel ver Hammer was a Scandinavian prince noted for his barbarity and fine cooking skills who ruled in the early to late 13th century, but strangely not during the middle, when he maître d’ed a hof brau in Dusseldork, Germania, called Spago. This is where he is purported to have invented Swedish meatballs (from the meat of an actual Swede’s balls) which he called Finnish Swede’s Balls. When years later he learned that they had been renamed and popularized by a Swede named Sven Finderflinkle, Kraus began his late-period rampaging, supposedly never to cook again.²

Further evidence of incipient royalty has been presented in the popular 17th century English couplet by Sir Francis Egg, reprinted here with author’s permission:

Where ye drunken royals stumble

Lowly orators doth stammer

To crusheth the rabble’s grumble

Needest thee a bigger Hammer

And of course, to the well-read, the Shakespearian antecedent is unmistakable. It is a long noted but little known and even more rarely reported story that his original title for the tragedy of the haunted Danish prince was Hammerlet. The haunted Danish prince he based the story on was none other than Prince Flimmer ven der Hammer, who had a meltdown after his father’s murder in 1372. Unlike Hamlet, Flimmer was twelve years old, which led many in the court to call him Hammerlet (Dan: Little Hammer), hence the original title. It was only owing to fierce lobbying from a pork merchant named Daytona Greer that led Shakespeare to opt for the more widely known Hamlet. In one of the first cooperative marketing crossovers, Greer sold hams and sausage links during the play, which ultimately led to the Bacon Uprising of 1605. Although Hamlet was a box-office success, because of his sell-out, Shakespeare never regained his earlier reverence among the blacksmith demographic, which cost him dearly during the High Holidays of 1611 when his horse crashed and he couldn’t get it rebooted for sixteen hours.

Wilhelm had little use for royal pretension, primarily because as the black sheep he could really only use it for bordello discounts and weekday video rentals, but to Elena (Maria Consuela), royalty meant the world, as her family tree had succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease and had been converted to firewood, leaving her with tainted roots but no leaves upon which to write the tale of her life. Royalty to Elena meant pole position at Hometown Buffet and Sizzler as well as bragging rights to the Sisters of Social Purity, the neo-fascist group she occasionally chaired, and she readily dropped her facile association with it into every conversation she could.

While this impressed none of her friends – though they would cluck and ahh as if it did – it positively humiliated Wilhelm, who not only doubted his own royalty, but doubted royalty in general, finding its claims of divine anointment ludicrous and puerile as well as those who succumbed to such notions. This likely resulted from his doubts in regard to divinity in general and utter disregard for human religious institutions, which he saw as destructive and silly.

Elena was ready to believe anything that lifted her above the common rabble, if only through marital selection – Wilhelm wanted nothing to do with anyone that didn’t ultimately involve scraping their reproductive and excretory apertures with his wildly active regenerative member. To Elena’s expanding displeasure, this he did with increasing frequency – often ten decibels or more – which led to escalating contretemps, as theirs was a relationship far from sound. Here her hateful hurt held high honor while his hearing was harmed, wholly honoring her offerings.

This hurt led to a life of painkillers and hospitalization for Elena, and grew along with the horrible secret she kept to herself, the burden of unspoken truth twisting and then breaking her over time. Wilhelm couldn’t know; I, especially, could never know, and that secret would be carried to the very end of this book – but not on the last page for those with no patience for delayed gratification – someplace near the end, really only appreciable to the astute reader who pays careful attention to every word and buys lots of copies of this for their friends and loved ones. Only they would know the horrible secret and it would speak to them throughout the ages. And sequels….

Wilhelm was born in the sleepy oceanfront town of Huntington Beach in what was then Burnt Umber County in Southern California, U.S.A. It was, as we all know, later changed to Orange County at the suggestion of Violet White after the well-read Settee Council black-balled Blue, Green or Yellow County against the wishes of Mayor Brown as expressed at Graystone Manor. Uninterestingly, Wilhelm had been conceived in the beeches at the Huntington Museum when Frank took Ruby – Wilhelm and brother Roberto’s mother – after viewing L. Gecko’s The Rape of the Cleaning Staff, on loan from Spaghetti Center.

Wilhelm and Frank had a contentious relationship, Frank often referring to Wilhelm with the Native American name he had given him on his spirits quest: Broken Rubber. At first Wilhelm thought this was an indication of some esteem in the perception of his otherwise distant father – Roberto was called In for a Penny – but when he was seven, Roberto told Wilhelm what a rubber was and their relationship nose-dived. When Frank learned his Native American name from the boys – Spatula – he sent Wilhelm to live with his mother, which was odd as she was just in the other room, folding laundry or something.

This could be said to be the very kind of name calling that led to the dissolution of Frank and Ruby’s tenuous relationship, the virtual annihilation of Frank and Wilhelm’s repugnant association, and further alienation in Frank and Roberto’s ambiguous affiliation, of course overlooking the years of neglect and abuse. Another marriage in names only. But the convenient and readily swallowed excuse is the other woman, so I’ll deflect the blame to her and she is helpless to stop it. Bwah ha ha ha ha!³

Elena had a less traditional upbringing. The youngest of a family of red-headed step-children, her father died before she was conceived, making her 50% orphan before she hit the open air of sleepy San Pedro, California. While her relationship remained consistent with her late father, Tomas Nomas, her relation with her mother, Alma Maria Conchita Henderson, was rocky: sometimes the smooth ones used for massages or skipping off water, but often enough the real pointy ones that hurt like hell when you step on them. They would often fight late into the night, sometimes with each other, sometimes just with their demons, which seemed partial to the night, though occasionally some of them would pop around on weekends or during the holidays.

Once when pressed by Elena to explaina why all these white-bread red-heads had Hispanic names, Alma blurted, Just be happy I didn’t run with Czechoslovakian, where they pronounce Elena, Elcqplnka. Distressed, Elena responded, Thanks Mom. You did me a solid. Every job app I submit gets shunted to janitorial. I should just call myself Jan. It will be little noted nor long remembered that Jan became her professional name, after which she limited janitorial to the home-front, Wilhelm’s brokerage office and the Sisters of Social Purity Redemption Center, twice a month and after ritual purgings.

After getting nuked during the Korean War – don’t ask – Wilhelm settled in Southern California into vocational drinking and serial debauchery. It didn’t pay well, but the hours were good and the benefits considerable. As one of the benefits, I can state with no equivocation that he considered it more than a few times during our time raising each other. For raising a child into an adult must also raise the adult in their practical life knowledge as well as crippling debt, sometimes that crippling debt practically all they have knowledge of. Wilhelm, while not a man of deep abiding honor, still owned his mistakes. At least the ones he got caught at, like most people. I mean, if nobody notices, why even bring it up? No sense being stupid and sloppy.

With Elena he was both, and I was ill-conceived out of headlock to a man ill-prepared to raise a son and a woman ill-equipped to contend with a Hammer, let alone a bunch of them. As I was not a for pay arrangement – Wilhelm’s check bounced – it was decided I was more a work of art than commerce and named appropriately thus. As Wilhelm was concurrently boinking Alma, the Spanish appellation Arturo beat out Arturock – or whatever horror Wilhelm held in store for me – and I got to start with Art. I know I could have done worse.

Wilhelm made an inordinate amount of money in corporate sales while Elena raised their brood of three. My brother, Esteban Victor, three years my junior, and sister Lorena Bambina, seven months Esteban’s junior, competed for the favor of Wilhelm (which I for the most part held), and the attention of Elena, herself constantly seeking attention: first from Wilhelm, then from anyone who would lend an ear. Eventually when the civilian population tired of her pathetic pleading, the medical staff was brought in with their probes and pills and unguents, offering attentions even beyond Elena’s target ideal. But a finger up the ass is a small price to pay for the feigned concern of disinterested strangers and her hospitalizations increased as the pharmaceutical companies came up with new things that were desperately wrong with her – along with their magical cures.

Wilhelm found release in all the coworkers, clients, friends, waitresses, housekeeping staff, family members that he could convince to give it up: his most coveted sales position was between someone’s legs. He convinced many to give it up, many that propriety, decency or even legality would have wisely precluded; and, as most, avoided any external repercussions for his behaviors, though as Alzheimer’s ate his mind over a hard decade at the end, he paid an increasingly higher price from within. Dementia as recompense for abysmal behavior is the equivalent of pummeling your dog six hours after it pissed in your sock drawer – the punished have no understanding of why they are being molested, the victimizer becomes the victim. Good then that we as a progressive society are content to bypass need for justification and torture based upon grandiose proclamation, freeing us of any misgivings. If it ain’t broke, break it. Then fix it, Wilhelm used to say. At least up to the point he broke and couldn’t be fixed.

After abusing the local population sufficiently, it was decided that a new local population would offer enhanced abusing opportunities and keep the expanding litany of former abusees at a manageable distance, so the family moved north to Santa Begonia⁴, California, the carnation capital of Soloma County. Santa Begonia – named after Saint Carlos (Two Lips) Begonia, martyred in 1112 by rearrangement – had a slogan: The City Designed for Living. As Wilhelm and Elena’s plan demanded vitality on the most fundamental level, it seemed like it might just be a match made in heaven. Certainly better than two cities over in Porkalumet, which billed itself The City With No Discernible Bladder Control.⁵ That place is a real pisser.

Santa Begonia was a nasty little town divided between rich celebrity land owners, dipsomaniac moralists, muddle-management mushwits, and, of course, the disgusting rabble which fed them. Wilhelm saw immediately where he could fit in and set about imposing his ironic will on the unsuspecting denizens, who unsurprisingly rejected most of his brazen advances with their hickish suspicions. Wilhelm learned young the value of the shotgun approach and didn’t allow rejection to dampen his spirits: Gordon’s Gin and Jim Beam. A hundred Nos could still yield a Yes and that Yes could very well be the one he sought. Of course, the likelihood was that it wouldn’t be the Yes he sought, more of a yeah or a yup, and then he just bugged a hundred people for nothing. With the shotgun, very few said no. Wilhelm started making money.

As Elena came from relative poverty – her relatives were poor too – she enjoyed spending money, but distressingly always got the cheapest stuff she could find. The birth of the 99 Scents store became the rebirth of religion in her – there she could worship daily. When she wasn’t hammering Wilhelm for his hammering whomever at any given time, or having him hammer Esteban or me for crimes against nature or whatever, she was prowling the aisles of stores that sold shitty stuff – slightly dented – cheap. She bought stuff she had absolutely no use for because she could get three for the price of one. She was the personification of capitalism’s inherent reality: consuming your life to get rich so you can buy cheap shit with it.

Even the splurges were limp: the powder blue diesel Mercedes, the gutless 240 D, a stripped-down extravengeance. The Freudian slip of the finger so telling: the extra vengeance of allowing Wilhelm a pussy magnet car and demagnetizing it before he drove it off the lot. The cheapest most expensive car they could find. Like going to the hoity toityest restaurant imaginable and ordering a baked potato and glass of water. Sure I’ll take sour cream, I’m kicking out the jams here…Chives? Be still my heart.

This the opposite effect of the much more popular squander your pathetic fortune purchasing the most expensive stuff imaginable, then turn around and sell it at a loss to cover your scandalous profligacy. These realities set against the social ideal of capitalism: accrue so much that you just can’t physically spend it all – twenty houses, a hundred cars, solid gold dancers…The dream of so much that you can provide for all your friends and loved ones – those less fortunate than you (Trans: your lessers) – tempered by the reality that, owing to the exponential growth of friends and family your largess would inspire, such behaviors would bankrupt you in an afternoon, leading to parsimony where largess loomed large in the imagination. Capitalism: the generosity of potential.

The Sharper Image catalog was not on Elena’s reading list and even though they contended with their lessers – as every greater must – they never felt flush enough to offer them succor without labor in return. Wilhelm and Elena were firmly entrenched in the system and it served them well, at least as to their creature comforts. As their primary creature, I must admit to living comfortably – I did not want for sustenance or shelter. But great books demand much more than that.

Santa Begonia was/is a fairly uninteresting place. North of San Francisco by an hour as the crow drives, there is little to do there beyond drinking or otherwise drugging yourself into a semi-stupor, then finding something to fuck. Not that that isn’t fun and all, but invariably all the drinking and fucking led to reproduction which, beyond the fucking part, isn’t particularly fun. Frankly it drives people even crazier, coupling the impossibility of having a stronger influence on your children than post-industrial society (driven by the commerce of cruelty) along with the expectation that you will pay for every need and most wants they can manifest, a Sisyphisian task in a society that keeps inventing vital new shit to buy.

Such pressure leads to more drinking, which leads to more injudicious fucking, which leads to further reproduction, and the machine chugs forth, pumping out more people for society to figure out what to do with, and more families to figure out what the hell they are doing. The problem lives in the short term: parents get all caught up in the kid stuff and then when the little apes hit teenage, they realize they’ll need something to do to keep them occupied and employed for the next fifty or so years. As we know fairly readily, that is all but impossible to do for oneself.

A century ago, parents still raised their children – in some religious sects and hippy houses they still do. But on the mean, the influence of our culture (or horrific lack thereof) on the young is as incalculable (C/Y~+-A-co=8^vi+Mu=+#>^

More realistically, addiction to distraction.

The average TV viewership in the U.S.A. is twenty-eight hours a week, which is four hours a day. If you make it to retirement age, you will have given nine years of your life to watching TV. There can be little doubt about the nature of what such media proffers: Programming. They themselves, the controllers of our cultural evolution, call it this. Programs. Four hours a day. On average. This of course doesn’t account for people who watch none at all, or the time spent staring into other differently sized screens for more guided input.

We’ll return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Movies and radio both hit around the beginning of the 20th century, and they have shaped our societies and behaviors in terrifying and fascinating ways. The early pioneers of media would likely be as astounded by our modern iLiving, plugged-in, uplinked, and downloaded world as someone in media at the beginning of the 19th century would have been at movies and radio only a century later. Post-industrial society changes hard and fast. Movies and radio provided something our world had never experienced: a direct means into the heads of the literate and illiterate alike.⁶

Where before a speaker had to be in immediate proximity to get into the eyes, ears and minds of the targeted audience, radio and motion pictures and TV created remote access – the audience didn’t know who was really speaking, just who was saying it. While early motion pictures were silent (noisy), the visuals were self-evident; anyone with a level of modern cognizance could understand what they were seeing, the presumption being that if you could make it into a movie theater, you’d know what a chair was, or a train.

Or perhaps even the importance of racial purity, as Mr. Griffith popularly expressed in his 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, a smash hit-and-burn among the mildly racist audiences of the U.S.A. That film’s release made it transparent to those in the know who now knew in no uncertain terms that the new medium offered a direct connection to the willing human mind. And that all human minds were willing.

Sluts.

Before long, radios appeared in every home, car, public space, and movie theaters appeared in every city, town or hamlet as the unseen voice expanded its realm of expression through the mouths of highly paid performers – show biz was born. While not a beautiful baby by any measure, its increasing ugliness over the years has certainly offered some visually sound arguments for abortion. Retroactive. Troublingly, while the big screen uses beauty to peddle ugliness, there appears to be no ugliness too ugly for the radio. And increasingly TV.

The unseen voice is the voice of remote control – it can affect you but you cannot affect it. It is the silent mouth that puts words into other, noisier mouths, which spread those words as fertilizer over the minds of the public in order to germinate consensus and harvest conformity, which is then served up with turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving. Those is some fine giblets, Missus.

The advent of these mediums of perception dissemination became the driving force of what journalist Walter Lippman termed the manufacture of consent. Speech, sound, and image crafted, engineered, and manipulated to create the perfect citizen: unquestioning, fiercely nationalistic, deferential to authority. The true brilliance by far: convincing the viewer, listener and target of this programming that they are not being manipulated, controlled and used; that in fact this endless slew of irrelevant, empty dreck is thoughtful and informative, often childish and shocking but essentially harmless. Gearing people toward exceptionalism, to racism, hatred, and intolerance is never harmless, and our media is doubtless a mind-bending behemoth.

I knew my choice to work in it was the right one.

II – HIGH SCHOOL LOWS

THE LUNCH KLAXON HAD RELEASED THE EDUCANTS OF Mount Gummy High School, one of Santa Begonia’s premier educational facilities, and they had moved appropriately from rows back into lines so they could slop themselves in their turns. The open courtyard was already littered with brown baggers, clustered in little collectives or chewing quietly in desperate isolation: a little something Mom threw together, bologna on white bread, how thoughtful. The other clusters, the jocks and cheerleaders, the young politicos practicing the schmooze, the dweebs drifting toward their various clubs: the chess club, the junior achievers, the Jesus club. Just like every other day.

Across the creek – where all the troublemakers hid to smoke their cannabis preparations – the hip kids wandered over to Oiler Burger to get some over-processed meat-stuffs off campus, or vacantly wandered the Mount Gummy Village mall until the klaxon again recalled them to their complacent inculcation. Little clusters formed there as well: a couple of solitary eaters next to each other but facing opposite directions, the jean-clad teenage girls giggling over their shakes and the stoners and other misfits hanging out off campus, many smoking cigarettes just as an excuse to be out of there. And the ever-present school pig, Rad Radar, squinty eyes on the mall goers, away from the school, as he chatted with student sycophants. Psychopants.

While the migrations and affiliations took their normal turn, something decidedly abnormal was occurring on a side street adjacent to the school. Three teenage boys sat in a faded yellow Jeep Wagoneer in sight of the school and chatted nervously. This is really weird. Is he there yet? Jerry spoke from the front seat.

He’s still on this street, you see him? Randolf pointed at the white Chevy station wagon about a hundred yards up the road driving away.

Yeah, well, he should be there quick, I think we should go. Jerry was understandably impatient.

It all seemed a breeze the night before in Randolf’s hut where the three of them had smoked out with Mick, the driver of the exiting station wagon, and hatched the nefarious plot. Randolf’s hut, the Grass Shack – a placard presented to Randolf, oddly enough by his parents proclaiming it thus – was a converted tool shed about 10 feet long by 5 feet less long that Randolf had moved into when his behaviors in the main house had given his parents pause. As such it had a single bed, a shelf for a stereo and some clothes stacked and hanging at the foot of the bed. There was also a chair that moved as space limitations demanded. As the plot was hatched, the Grass Shack had become so full of cannabis smoke the air hung dense like a heavy, fragrant fog.

Go! No equivocation or doubt. The time had come. The doors opened as one and the boys hopped out, slamming them behind them. Then they ran. The students drifting away from the school toward the mall spotted them first, astounded, laughing and gape-mouthed. The three jogged past them without apparent notice and into the school.

Down the long open breezeways their fellow students marveled at what advanced past them and into the main hub of activity, the center court. Cries went up from some of those closest to the corridor, alerting the students nearby as to the incipient intrusion. Then from the shrouded breezeway into the bright sun-lit courtyard, half the student body milling about, along with teachers, the dean and main student oppressors, Mr. Moon and Mr. Apache, the three burst and fairly jogged through the lunch crowds staring in utter disbelief. The officials, eyes down, shook their heads – nothing could exist as sacred ever again.

Mount Gummy High School had been streaked.

The three maintained their deliberate but unhurried pace through the courtyard, leaping off the steps over startled seniors, jumpy juniors and freakish freshmen, toward the doorway to their freedom, which opened onto the track and field, the far end at which sat Mick at the wheel of the white Chevy. Everyone remained motionless as they ran through, unmolested, then three girls followed them to the door way, giggling. And then Combs, the little Mexican jock, currying favor with his white overlords, gave chase.

"Touch me and I’ll break your